Drones used "primarily in a hunter/killer role" will be piloted remotely from eastern Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs announced this morning.

The U.S. Air Force has chosen the Pennsylvania Air National Guard’s 111th Fighter Wing in Montgomery County to take on the new remotely piloted aircraft mission.

The wing is based at the Horsham Air Guard Base, which is a remnant of the former Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove along Route 611.

The federal National Guard Bureau authorized the wing to establish a ground-control station of MQ-9 Reaper drones effective Oct. 1.

Nearly 250 jobs, about 75 of which are full-time positions, will be added to the wing to support this new mission.

Those jobs will be mainly for Air National Guard members, said Air National Guard Master Sgt. Chris Botzum, spokesman for the wing.

The news comes amid a freeze on government hiring, Botzum said, following automatic budget cuts that took effect recently because of so-called sequestration.

“This is great news for Pennsylvania, especially when you consider the government cutbacks nationwide,” Maj. Gen. Wesley Craig, Pennsylvania’s adjutant general, said in a statement. “We are fortunate that Gov. Tom Corbett and local, state and federal elected officials were able to help secure such a major military and economic victory for Pennsylvania.”

The MQ-9 Reaper will be controlled from a virtual cockpit at the Horsham
base by a two-person team consisting of a pilot and a sensor operator.
The actual aircraft will not be located on the base, state military
officials said.

Col. Howard “Chip” Eissler, commander of the 111th Fighter Wing, said the drones will be involved in "overseas missions."

Fountain Hill native Paul McHale, the former Lehigh Valley congressman and assistant secretary of defense for homeland security who is also a retired Marine Reserve colonel, said he sees drones being "increasingly used for reconnaissance missions as well as strike missions."

"I think the use of drones, in particularly Afghanistan, has been a case study of 21st-century warfare," he told The Express-Times this afternoon. "My belief is that over time, more and more missions that historically have been flown by pilots in the aircraft will, in fact, be flown by pilots controlling drones in the combat airspace."

"I think the nature of air warfare is undergoing a fundamental change and drones will be at the center of that evolving air capability," he said in a telephone interview. "I think that we're going to see an increasing transition of missions from manned aircrafts to the drones."

Casualty concerns

At the same time, drone attacks have the potential to create more enemies, opponents say.

The Bethlehem-based Lepoco Peace Center, at its annual dinner Saturday in the city, hosted Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink and author most recently of “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.”

In her talk, Benjamin focused on the deadly effects of drone warfare. She said that, despite the millions the United States sends in aid every year to Pakistan, three out of four Pakistanis see America as their enemy because of U.S. drones in their skies. Civilian deaths, including nearly 200 children under the age of 16, are attributed to these drones, Benjamin claimed.

A 2012 investigation by The Associated Press into 10 of the recent deadliest drone strikes in Pakistan over the previous two years found that a significant majority of the casualties were militants, but civilians were also killed.

Villagers told the AP that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent — at least 138 — were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011.

The U.S. Air Force says its MQ-9 Reaper drone is a "remotely piloted hunter/killer weapon system." "M" is the U.S. Department of Defense designation for multi-role, "Q" means unnamed aircraft system and "9" indicates it's the ninth in the series of remotely piloted aircraft. Its armament capability is a combination of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, GBU-12 Paveway II and GBU-38 joint direct attack munitions.

Figures from the U.S. Air Force about the MQ-9 Reaper include:

66: wingspan in feet

4,900: weight in pounds

230: cruise speed in mph

1,150: range in miles

50,000: maximum altitude

$53.5 million: unit cost for four aircraft with sensors, in Fiscal Year 2006 dollars